Project Team:

Expertise:

Professor Swerdlow has worked on epidemiological studies of cancer aetiology
for the past 20 years. Professor Greaves has a long-established track
record of research on the biology of leukaemia and has been director
of the Leukaemia Research Fund Centre at the Institute of Cancer Research
for 17 years. Professor Linch is a highly experienced academic haematologist
and clinical oncologist who has been treating leukaemia for more than
20 years.

Approach:

The project is a case-control study comparing mobile phone use and other
radio-frequency radiation exposure, and in addition other potentially
confounding exposures such as ionising radiation and genes, between cases
(i.e. patients who have the study cancers) and controls (subjects who
do not have these cancers). The study plans to recruit 900 leukaemia
patients and 900 controls, aged 18 to 59 years in the south-east of England.

Potential Difficulties:

It is time consuming and expensive to identify, make contact with and
interview patients of these studies, but we have considerable experience
of so doing and with persistence these problems are overcome.

Importance:

To address the possibility that mobile phone exposure may cause cancers
in man, it is essential to investigate whether risk of cancer is raised
in human populations according to their phone exposure. This is what
this project sets out to do for leukaemia cancers for which the possibility
of an association needs to be clarified.